@Nate_Pearson - improvement suggestion as I’ve been playing with the plans. When you get to the “Review Plan” stage, it would be very helpful if at the top of the plan it showed all of the choices you made along the way - e.g., Plan Volume, Masters / not-Masters, events, focus, etc. - even better would be if you could tweak each of these from the “Review Plan” page. The idea is if I need to tweak something I have to hit the “Back” button to get to the screen that has the parameter I want to change, then go next, next, etc to get back to Review Plan. Plus having the choices shown on the Review Plan page would also make it easy to find if I made a “mistake”. 2nd improvement would be to write all of this info into the plan annotation in my Calendar.
This is a really well designed feature. I do a lot of mountain bike training and long endurance rides so I’ve been looking for a way to just do two hard structured sessions a week and have them track across a whole training blocks (as opposed to just randomly deleting one every week or using train now).
In addition to the described target audience, I think that this will be an awesome feature for the “people who want structured training but also want to mountain bike a lot or do other things” group.
@Nate_Pearson I think at some point it needs to be addressed what drives the changes to the plans. Maybe worth an extended discussion on the podcast.
Is it users inability to adhere to older plans? Doesn’t catering to that cause a shift to the middle for everyone? Is it driven by new science/studies? Have the polarized plans impacted how the other plans are created because that model has been successful? (or is it no different in what you see in the data?). Who’s making the decisions on the plans? Panels of coaches, just one guy? TR algorithms? Is the older sweet spot heavy model inferior to the new offerings? Or you think people will see the same or more adaptations with less work (certainly fewer strenuous days)? What’s that rooted in?
Obviously we’re all interested in constant improvement, and appreciative of you guys developing new plans/workouts and adapting to what’s learned. It’d be super lame if 10+ years in you only had the same exact plans as when TR initially launched.
From my perspective though, if I was being coached privately, and I had done something for 5+ years that worked…and then the coach said, “hey, we’re not doing that anymore, we’re doing this instead”… I’d want to know why. What is driving that decision.
I’m sure I’m not the only one with that on my mind.
I’ve coached for 20ish years now… my training plans aren’t the same and evolve. It’s mostly from stealing ideas from other coaches, experimentation, quirky ideas, literature and trying to adapt for the current crop of athletes.
To me the training plans have been “modernized” which is a good thing. You will never make everyone happy nor will every training plan work for each individual. I think that’s where we make adjustments to benefit your specific situation.
Perhaps, but everything else is like it should be (at least for Base, I haven’t checked further ahead). And I did not select “Master’s”.
Still two months before it needs to be fixed 
That’s true, but it’s not a huge deal**, and offers a practical workaround for now. I do this - add additional warm-up and/or cool-down periods - to nearly every TR workout I do and have done for the past few years, so I’m familiar with the hassle level, which isn’t huge.
** the one caveat to this is that Intensity adjustment has a long-standing “feature” (bug) - memory leak or something? - on Android, which means that the adjustment buttons become laggier and laggier the longer the workout’s been running for, which combined with the long-press feature which does 5% steps often leads to massive under/overshoots of the number you’re aiming for. Slow devices magnify this button lag, to the point of unusability if you’re a couple of hours into a workout, but it also occurs on new fast devices IME. This problem’s been going on for years and really should’ve been addressed by now… HINT 
@Nate_Pearson say you want to train five days a week but you want the TSS of the high volume plan workouts, would you be better off choosing a mid volume plan and upping the durations of the workouts or choosing the high volume plan and removing one of the recovery rides each week?
@Nate_Pearson I didn’t get the opportunity to be careful. I’m on week 5 of Sweet Spot Base 1 and I’m 58 years old. When I first signed in on the site yesterday, the popup appeared and had me choose between the normal low volume and Master’s. I chose to not update to Master’s because I wanted to look over things first. It seemed to automatically take away the recovery week scheduled for next week and instead, I had 8 weeks of base before recovery. I contacted support through chat and was told that is just the way the implementation works.
That’s fine but it leaves me with the options of taking a recovery week next week followed by two more weeks then recovery again OR just working through eight straight weeks before a recovery week. Neither seems ideal from a training standpoint. What do you suggest?
Me too
Any thoughts on the utility of this for someone who has the least ideal setup possible for Trainerroad?
I don’t have a powermeter nor place to setup my non-smart trainer, so I’d be doing all workouts outside via RPE.
That info aside, Low Volume Masters plans sound perfect for my lifestyle and I like the idea of getting told what sort of efforts to do, rather than my usual random hill repeats.
That’s a matter of opinion. I’m familiar with it too, and personally I find trying to prod my way through the process on a screen that doesn’t want to cooperate with my sweaty fingers a considerable faff. The fewer clicks the better, in my opinion.
I like it, and its typically the style of a plan I was following last year. With riding outdoors Sat and Sun and commuting I’d typically drop the intensity of the middle LV workout in winter. It’ll save me mucking about with the plan. Its got me down for a rest week, I’ve just finished a rest week and a subsequent week and a half off to move so I might try a SS workout (close to my current PL) instead but I’ll see how I feel when I jump on the trainer. But on the whole a good move from you folks at TR 
The general increased functionality of being able to select the different plan volumes and then adjust how many hours per day is the one thing I wanted most of all the improvements in the pipeline, so I’m really happy with the changes.
@timon From what I can see, the new plans align with current thinking that 2-3 intense workouts per week is enough regardless. And the general principles of training haven’t changed for a long time regardless of how much volume you do - there needs to be progressive overload + recovery. The masters plans look ideal to me, as I was essentially turning a low volume sweet spot plan into a mid volume masters plan manually by adding extra low intensity sessions around the 3 quality work outs.
Not to downplay anyone’s concerns, but Trainerroad is a semi-automated system and clearly their plans work, whatever the sessions might end up as. For a system to calculate the progression between sessions, whilst it is ultimately just maths, is pretty fantastic for the cost of what we pay for TR. Unless we’re coaching a team of world tour riders with years of data to interrogate ourselves, let’s not kid ourselves that our own tinkering with the plans, based on our own sample size of n=1 makes a massive difference. And if you know you train better in a particular way, with a particular set of sessions then nothing stops you putting them in.
Can we now get a mid-low plan with 4 workouts a week? 
i put a plan in my calender to try it out. its still giving me endurance workouts based on PLs. 2 hour endurance workouts when my PL at endurance is >7 because i do > 4hour rides outdoors, means they are giving me tempo workouts. its the same as a few months ago. TR needs to stop prescribing endurance work based on PL intensity. endurance work is about duration at lower intensity. c’mon guys, we losing the coaching aspect here.
Why not just switch off erg mode for that part? Surely that’s only one key? Sorry if that’s not an option…I only have a dumb trainer so never use (or want to use) erg!
Really dont see much need for it but I expect it will be coming. The solution is just to add an endurance workout to your week.
Just when I thought I was out; they pull me back in.
These masters plans are exactly what I had hoped they would be. As a 45 year old athlete I feel like I will benefit greatly for the 2 hard workouts per week. Looking forward to getting started next week.
I just signed up this week and did not realise these features were so new! I really like the ability to adjust the length of the workouts to the time I have available and swap to suitable days. Sunday endurance is great too.
Similar here but for my plan, only base2 was planned as Masters General Base2. So I changed two master general base2 from the calendar into general base2.